1. Yesterday at the BART station I overheard a guy say he was sacked. There were 2500 people in his department and they got rid of 2000 of them. 2. In the last week I have seen two people in my neighborhood sleeping in their cars 3. My sweetie works in a school. I taught him to play a game that only requires a wall clock but none of the rooms where he works has working clocks 4. My sweetie teaches the kids computer lab. He had a kid recently seriously ask him how to get to "the game that makes a blank screen you can write with." He had another child who did not know what the space bar was for. The budget cuts continue. Posted via email from Future is...

Burning the library in slow motion: how copyright extension has banished millions of books to the scrapheap of history Boing Boing. I came across this nice article by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing wherein he makes some interesting points on how current copyright laws have censored the majority of books. the legal changes introduced in the years after Fahrenheit 451 did more than just extend terms. Congress eliminated the benign practice of the renewal requirement (which had guaranteed that 85% of works and 93% of books entered the public domain after 28 years because the authors and publishers simply didn’t want or need a second copyright term.) And copyright, which had been an opt-in system (you had to comply with some very minor formalities to get a copyright) became an opt out system (you got a copyright automatically when you “fixed” the work in material form,...